An American Pipedream: Reviving USA-Made Clothing

For thirty years, the soulless machine of fast fashion has been chewing up the guts of America’s textile industry, spitting out scraps of profit, and calling it progress. Meanwhile, the formerly sacred ideals of quality, craftsmanship, and “built to last” have been trampled into the mud, replaced by cheap seams and an emphasis on shareholder bonuses. It’s a crime, a quiet massacre, and scarcely anyone mourns it.

But today—right now—our little corner of the world is raising a middle finger to that chaos. Sure, we’re known for slinging military surplus jackets and assorted oddities to the delight of our online community, but now we’re taking a swing at something bigger. We’re diving headfirst into a wild, improbable experiment: crafting our own line of American-made clothing. The real deal. Not just clothing, but a kind of aesthetic armor—designed to outlast the trends, the seasons, and potentially even the wearer.

We’re starting with one garment, a symbol of all things durable and daring: The McGrath Bomber Jacket in Blumentarn. A canvas beast, built tough enough to endure the day-to-day but sharp enough to turn heads.

This isn’t some overnight success story. No, this jacket has been clawing its way into existence since December 2021. Back then, the company was just Aiden and me, two wild-eyed young fools trying to figure out if this little surplus outfit could be more than just a side hustle. One blustery December day, I scribbled a crude sketch inspired by a vintage Duxbak bomber jacket I’d bought. We both laughed at the absurdity of actually making it. A clothing line? Us? Ridiculous.

But something stuck.

By spring 2022, we’d moved into our first warehouse, and the McGrath started to feel less like a fantasy and more like an inevitability. We hired a friend to create the first pattern—a Frankenstein’s monster of fabric and blind optimism. From there, we brought in a design firm to grade the pattern to create sizes and produce samples. That’s when the real madness began.

The first sample came back with the collar sewn on upside down. Not a big deal, I thought—until the fixes became an endless loop of errors. The collar, in particular, was a disaster. It sat stiff and boxy, forcing the jacket to ride up awkwardly. Plumber’s crack wasn’t just a risk; it was a guarantee. Six rounds of revisions later, I realized we’d been duped by our own blueprint. The collar was flawed at the core—sewn in a straight line when it needed a subtle curve. An entire year wasted. Thousands of dollars evaporated. Hundreds of hours sunk into nothing. The kind of frustration that makes you want to set the whole thing on fire.

Enter Nicole, our savior. A Clothing Design & Development major at UW-Stout and a miracle worker in disguise. She joined the team in 2023, took one look at our mess, and confirmed our suspicions: the original design firm was dead weight. We dumped them, partnered with Patterns World Inc. in LA, and finally had a prototype worth believing in.

With a working pattern in hand, we barreled into the next phase: sourcing materials. Nicole began cold-calling manufacturers, chasing down fabric. The big challenge? Finding a factory to print the custom East German Blumentarn camo pattern. After weeks of hunting, we struck gold with Impex Textiles in LA. They printed 1,800 yards of 10oz cotton canvas for us—just enough, we thought, to make our first run. Corduroy, rib knit, zippers, snaps—all the other components fell into place like pieces of some cosmic puzzle. Sourced from Talon, a local Wisconsin knitting mill and a fabric wholesaler or two, we gathered all the ingredients over the course of a year.

But the final boss was manufacturing. And this is where the story takes a turn into the strange. At ANME (Army Navy Military Expo), we met Stephen Brents. Stephen had spent six decades in the textile game, witnessing the collapse of American manufacturing with a kind of quiet defiance. He’d just bought 300,000 pounds of surplus in a blind deal, and he needed help sorting through it. I flew down to Shreveport, Louisiana, to lend a hand, but what I found was more than just bulk surplus. Stephen was a living map of the American clothing industry’s forgotten corridors. Over dusty pallets and piles of vintage wool, he handed us the connections we needed to push the McGrath Bomber across the finish line.

One of those connections was Priscilla, the founder of Bait Apparel Industries in Texas. Her team took our pile of parts and turned them into actual jackets. By the fall of 2024, the McGrath was a reality. But, of course, the universe couldn’t let us off easy just yet. We ran out of fabric before we could hit our planned run of 930 jackets. The final count was 740, and our costs unexpectedly  jumped 20%. An incredibly painful lesson in logistics, but we made it work.

Now, as I write this, those jackets are sitting in our warehouse in Appleton, Wisconsin, waiting to be unleashed. Just seeing them there feels like a fever dream—a mix of relief, disbelief, and a lingering sense of "What the hell did we just pull off?"

The McGrath Bomber isn’t just a jacket. It’s a battle cry against fast fashion, a testament to persistence, and a reminder that even the most absurd dreams can become real if you’re crazy enough to chase them. If you’re reading this and longing to do something insane, let it light a fire under you: Step one is all you need to get started. The rest? Figure it out as you go.